Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Tatteredfragments E1v3
Tatteredfragments E1v3
Much of, but not all, the work contained herein was created expressly for this publication.
All material courtesy of the authors. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Special thanks to Julia Sherman, Norman and Pepita Katz, Kelly Zinser, Telic Arts
Exchange, g727 and Adrian Rivas, Chiparaki, Mia Locks, Lucky Dragons, Dan Plaza and
Cooperation, MX and CD Gee, Denis Wood, Cybelle Tondu, Jessica Wang, all the artists /
writers who contributed to this project, friends and family near and far.
Contents
PREFACE 7
INTRODUCTION
Brian Rosa 9
Adam Katz with Denis Wood 11
ANTHONY AUERBACH:
The World is a Cut-Up 21
BILL BROWN:
Oklahoma Motel 31
Biosphere 2 33
SIMONE HANCOX:
The Map is Performed in the Territory 37
ELIZABETH EVITTS DICKINSON:
The Rise of the User Generated City 43
BILL FOX:
The Angels of Mulholland Drive 49
HERBERT GOTTFRIED: 55
North Acton, Route 27 Community Gardens 56
Comfort Suites Under Construction, Bedford 57
GERARDO GREENE GONDI:
Image Texture 59
ALEX HABER:
Mapping the Void in Perec’s Species of Spaces 63
CRIS BENTON:
A Brief History of Kite Aerial Photography 73
ANUSHA VENKATARAMAN:
Situating the Grassroots: Collectivity and Imagination 85
Preface
7
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
8
T he word “frontier” has numerous definitions, from “the area
along an international border” to “a region just beyond or at
the edge of a settled area” to “an undeveloped area or field for discov-
ery.” Perhaps this multiplicity of meanings under a single name is an
apt metaphor for the collection of artworks and essays included in the
Photocartographies project – an examination of the margins, a re-con-
textualization of landscape, a proposition for subjective, and perhaps
subversive, cartographic discovery.
Authorities recently discovered that smugglers have developed a
network of dozens of tunnels, engineered in various degrees of sophisti-
cation, to burrow below the newly- constructed frontier walls between
Mexico and the United States. In the event One Flew Over the Void, as
part of inSITE 2005, the Bulbo arts collective shot a human cannonball
over the wall separating Tijuana from San Diego. A concrete border’s
impermeability is reliant on its inflexibility and rigidity, but therein also
lies its weakness. When one can’t get around, one must go over or under.
Cartographic boundaries are not usually so literal as border walls, but
this makes them no less real and no less powerful. As much as these
subversive tactics dissolve borders in a figurative sense, the lines on the
map (and the terrain) remain.
Unlike the history of most forms of visual and verbal communica-
tion, the history of mapping has shown few movements of popular or
subversive expression. Incipient art practices that play with or question
the authority of maps have begun to flourish as mapping has emerged as
a ubiquitous tool, as well as a dominant graphical paradigm. The process
9
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
-Brian Rosa
10
I n 1992, Denis Wood coauthored The Power of Maps, a book
(and an exhibition by the same name) that radically challenged
the authority of cartography and revealed maps as complicated social
constructs. His work was instrumental to the movement of critical car-
tographers and has continued to be at the forefront of critical thought
surrounding the history of mapmaking, counter-mapping and map art.
Indeed, his writing foregrounds much of the thinking that brought about
this book and the accompanying exhibition. Although I approached this
project with more appetite than expertise, I had read Denis’ books and
been compelled by this epistemology of maps. Today, with the prolif-
eration of mapping, and the technology for manipulating map imagery,
it seems appropriate to revisit the map as potential site of power and
knowledge formation.
Denis was kind enough to share some thoughts from his home in
Raleigh, North Carolina.
Denis Wood: I don’t think mapmaking is more than five or six hun-
dred years old as a widespread practice. Cartography, as such, is far, far
11
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
12
Introduction
Well, the thing about graphic spatial representations is this: it’s like
talking and writing. Certainly everybody talks, there’s no question
about that. But not everybody writes. And people for most of human
history have lived very full lives without writing. It seems like writing
is something some cultures develop when there comes a pressing need
because of the growth in size and complexity of the society; a need to
record things without trusting them to the fallibility of human memory.
Or to record things because the people who are going to be engaged are
too far apart to see each other. For example, early pre-cuneiform writing
clearly came from the need of trading partners who don’t see each other
at opposite ends of a trade-link to know what was being sent. The person
receiving wants to know what was being sent, not just what he gets. If
he’s being sent a hundred sheep he needs to know he’s not being sent
eighty sheep when eighty sheep show up. So they included these little
tokens in these clay balls. Anyhow, they weren’t going to have face- to-
face relationships, they were going to have long-lasting distant relation-
ships and they really wanted to record them. These people seemed to
develop writing.
The same thing is true with mapping. Everybody creates spatial im-
ages of their environment that they depend on them to navigate and to
attach meaning to places, and so forth. Indeed, it goes a ways down the
phylogenetic ladder. Humans, animals, life-forms do this: they create
these images of space. Whether or not they need to record them, make
them graphic, is a whole other question. And guess what, it depends
13
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
14
Introduction
tional discords, the differences between the New England north and the
slave-owning South, not to mention the Mid-Atlantic states… What
unified these things? The only thing after the revolution that unifies
them is that they can point to this map of thirteen colonies as an entity,
as a thing. And he demonstrates that this map hangs in taverns, it’s in
homes, people have it over their piano, they have it over their mantle,
it’s everywhere.
The same story can be told of 17th Century Japan. There is a history
of insane discord that is finally solved under the forthcoming shogunate.
Somebody pulls it all together, the civil war stops…. What’s the first
thing he does? He says: okay, we’re going to map the country. And guess
what the mapping does? It does a lot of things – one thing, it gets eve-
ryone unified in a national task at the same time it’s giving him highly
detailed information about how many people live here and how much
rice is there and what kind of taxes he’s going to be able to get there.
This is brought together into a map. That map becomes so popular, map-
ping becomes so popular, by the time you coast into the 18th Century
in Japan, they’re mapping everything. They’re mapping the route from
Kyoto to Edo. They’re mapping the locations of all the brothels in Edo
so that if you’re traveling there you can find one. They’re mapping the
country as a whole, they’re mapping individual provinces, they have
atlases, it just doesn’t stop. It was the same story happening in China,
same story happening in Russia, same story happening in Thailand,
same story happening in India. The story was being replicated wherever
the young nation states were coming into being.
In The Power of Maps, you outline how maps inscribe power and
support dominant political structures. Since then, your work has
inspired many efforts (activist and academic – even artistic) to coun-
ter the normative modes of cartography and to resist the repression
of the state, capital, etc. In the wake of critical cartographers came
counter cartography. Now we have examples of counter-counter-
cartography – could you explain what this is and what it indicates
about the power of maps?
15
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
16
Introduction
that counters Palestine with the state of Israel, which counters its Arab
past: Arab names and Arab places, with Jewish names, Hebrew language
and biblical history. And that is the map we all become familiar with as
the state of Israel came into being and became an existent state. In fact,
we’re pretty unaware of all this earlier history.
Having created Israel and having pushed the Palestinians out of their
land, the Israelis created a powerfully focused Palestinian nationalism.
And these Palestinians looked at these Israeli maps and they rejected
them completely. They said “This is not the place, this is not our map,
it does not have the right names on it, this map does not have the real
places on it.” Late in the game, the Palestinians started creating a coun-
ter-counter-map of Palestine, and this counter-counter-map reached
its apotheosis in the sort of incredible atlas of Abu-Sitta, called Atlas
of Palestine, in 1948. This is an ongoing project now of the Palestinian
counter-counter-mapping of the Israeli counter-mapping of the imperi-
alist maps of Arab Palestine.
17
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
If it’s going to be taken as a map, it’s going to have to wear its signs of
authority. It’s going to have to have those or it’s not going to be accepted
as a map. It’s going to be accepted as something like a map or something
playing with a map, etc. For example, it’s going to be accepted as an art
map. The first things artists attack are those signs of authority. But, with-
out those signs of authority it’s not going to be read as a map. The thing
that a map is, is authoritative. That’s what a map is. The being-ness of a
map is its authoritativeness. Without that, it’s not a map. It’s nothing. Or
it’s a picture, it’s a photograph.
If I go back into these histories where historians of cartography make
these claims about its ancient past and they talk about “wherever man
has had a sense of place, he has been driven to make some kind of map,
however primitive, blah blah blah.” And then they follow this forward
and somehow it inexorably leads to the United States Geological Survey,
right? I wonder why when they walk forward with that they don’t follow
this instinct to create an understanding of place into poetry, into the
prose that will follow later on, into landscape painting, into other forms
of making reference to symbologizing place. They never follow those
because they’re doing a map history. If you follow back into landscape
painting you will find precisely the same claim made about its roots that
you find at the heart of the beginning of the map history, except histori-
ans will follow it forward to landscape painting. These are all retrospec-
tive views of this urge, a kind of projection of contemporary practice
back into some distant past. Now I guess one of the claims I’m making
is - whatever maps are, it’s not about creating a sense of place; whatever
maps are, it’s about being a vehicle for the creation and conveyance of
authority about, and ultimately over, territory.
18
Introduction
know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this
is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting
the world as it looks.” Do you perceive a similar trajectory between
the photographic and the cartographic technologies despite their
distinct modalities?
19
The World is a Cut-Up
Anthony Auerbach
1 ‘The fragment is the intrusion of death into the work.’ Quoted in ‘Editors’ Afterword’
to Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann,
trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1997), p361.
2 Geografia: Tavole Moderne di Geografia de la Maggior parte del Mondo di di-
versi avtori raccolte et messe secondo l’ordine di Tolomeo con idisegni di molte citta
et fortezze di diverse provintie stampate in rame con studio et diligenza in Roma, by
Antonio Lafreri, usually dated 1550–1572.
21
fig. 1 Geografia: Tavole Moderne by Antonio Lafreri, c. 1550–1572,
title page.
Anthony Auerbach
23
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
24
Anthony Auerbach
25
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
26
fig. 2 ‘Atlas, bearer of the heavens’ from The Cosmographical Glasse
by William Cunningham, 1559.
Anthony Auerbach
multiplicity of interests.10
Here lies the strategic value of aerial reconnaissance and its challenge
to would-be prospectors: interpretation.
10 J. K. S. St. Joseph (ed.), The Uses of Air Photography: Nature and Man in a New
Perspective (London: John Baker, 1966), p15.
29
Oklahoma Motel
Bill Brown
31
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
going on at the Indian casinos you find all over this state. That’s where
the conquering race – hobbling around with walkers and clacking their
dentures – slips quarters in the slots and pays off its historical debts one
quarter at a time.
32
Biosphere 2
Bill Brown
33
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
ble gardens. The monkeys squealed all night and drove the Biospherians
crazy. The bees died. Most serious of all, the oxygen levels inside the
Biosphere began to plummet. No one could figure out why. Due to the
lack of oxygen, the Biospherians began to stumble around and bump
into walls and act confused. After a few months, Biosphere 2 was in bad
shape. Lynn the tour guide implies that the Biospherians wound up hat-
ing each other. I find out later that they split into two factions: the True
Believers who would do anything to make the project work, and the
Realists who thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to open a window and let
in some fresh air. In the end, the people running the project decided to
pump in oxygen. They really had no other choice, but it pretty much de-
feated the whole point of a sealed, self-contained environment. 2 years
later, when the Biospherians finally emerged from the Biosphere, they
were pale (since the greenhouse glass filtered out UV light) and skinny
(since the various ecosystems barely produced enough food) and pretty
sick of Biosphere 2.
We follow Lynn around. Originally, the greenhouse was all sealed up,
and tourists couldn’t go inside. Now it doesn’t matter. We walk through
the Biosphere 2 gourmet kitchen, and past one of the Biosphere 2 bed-
rooms with abstract expressionist paintings hanging on the wall. One
of the original Biospherians painted them, apparently while suffering
from acute oxygen deprivation. We troop through the rainforest, and
the marsh. We stare at the million-gallon ocean and listen to the lonely
pulse of the wave machine, slow and regular, like the fading pulse of
some monstrous dying thing. We stand there for a while, looking out
over a dead sea under a sky of steel trellis and glazed glass. Lynn men-
tions that there wasn’t enough money to construct a solar power system
and make Biosphere 2 truly self-sufficient. Instead, it gets its electricity
from the local electrical company. No one on the tour says anything, but
I’m pretty sure we’re all starting to think the same thing: that Biosphere
2 isn’t just a failure, but a Colossal Fiasco, and this causes all of us to
lapse into a kind of embarrassed silence.
After the tour, Lynn ditches us, leaving us all to wander around the
place, alone and unsupervised. There are no surveillance cameras. No
docents or security guards. I say to Sarah that it feels like we’re astro-
34
Bill Brown
35
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
plaques that neither of us has the heart to read. We’re pretty sure we
know what they don’t say. They don’t say that Biosphere 2 has all the
elements of a Greek tragedy. A not very good, B-grade Greek tragedy,
in fact, featuring an arrogant billionaire with big but totally hazy ambi-
tions, a Greek chorus of freaky voodoo scientists, an insane project, and
a series of disasters that reduces the whole thing to ruins. Maybe that
was the point all along. Maybe Ed Bass is an eco-radical genius, and he
figured the best way to demonstrate the fragility of Biosphere 1 was to
build Biosphere 2 and watch it crash and burn. A dramatic lesson that
would cause people to set aside their plans to colonize Mars, and stop
treating this planet like a disposable diaper. If that was the plan, I guess
it failed, too.
36
The Map is Performed
in the Territory
Simone Hancox
37
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
ologies have been, and are, accredited with greater scientific objectivity.
In spite of this, rather than heralding the map as purveyor of a transhis-
torical truth, “maps are at least as much an image of the social order
as they are a measurement of the phenomenal world.”2 Bearing this in
mind, how does the map-territory metaphor conceived by Korzybski
in the 1930s inform how we interpret the contemporary cultural, social,
technological and political milieu? Considering that today, satellite
pictures, mobile mapping devices and geotagging are widely available
to a viewing public, and in an age when cartography increasingly uses
the medium of photography, the map teeters ever closer to a simulation
of the territory. More specifically, how does this affect the individual’s
processing of the world, and particularly one’s experience of space? Like
Korzybski’s theory of the semantic map which is contingent on a given
milieu and personal circumstance, the cartographic map is implicated
by the context from whence it is born – it is a reciprocal relationship.
To reiterate: it is not that the development of cartography impacts upon
one’s capacity to comprehend “being in the world,” but it does penetrate
how any given individual interprets it; in turn, the personal map one
uses to read the world affects the cartographic objects and images that
any given individual(s) produce(s). The phenomenological resonance
in Korzybski’s relativist thinking suggests that it is impossible to escape
from one’s very position in the world, which informs the personal map
used to interpret the territory. If there is an objective reality, it lies outside
of the self. Of course, Korzybski’s logic may become problematic when
it reduces our access to the world to solely subjective realities, devoid
of any Aristotelian sensus communis (indeed, he was an anti-Aristotelian
thinker). Nevertheless, rather than critiquing this theory here, I intend
to glean the positive awakenings of what this map-territory thesis may
offer to our understanding of cartography (and particular its relation-
ship with photography) in current practices.
Both cartography and photography have received criticism for ap-
propriating the landscape through temporally static, spatially delimited
2 Harley, J. B. (2001) The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, p158.
38
Simone Hancox
39
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
40
Simone Hancox
5 Ferguson, Russell and Francis Alÿs (2007) ‘Russell Ferguson in conversation with
Francis Alÿs’ in F. Alÿs, et al. (eds.) Francis Alÿs, London: Phaidon, p40.
41
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
42
The Rise of the
User Generated City
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson
43
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
his blog. To look at his map out of context, you would never know it to
be speculative.
The purpose of a map is to place us geographically, to define and
outline our world. As such, maps are often taken as reality, as objec-
tive presentations of fact. Anyone studying cartography, however,
recognizes maps as a relatively subjective form. They have always been
communication tools rooted in culture and history and how we under-
stand territory depends on our perspective. Interpretation, bias, and
circumstance play a large role. Take, for example, the research of Ohio-
based archivist William C. Barrow. In 2003 he studied official maps of
Cleveland and found, among other things, subdivisions that were never
realized. “Inaccuracies in local history maps are most often caused by
the failure of commercial map makers to keep track of changes in the
community, or by their need to incorporate the newest information as it
comes available, sometimes adding features that ultimately never appear
on the ground,” he wrote at the time.
Today, new technologies allow improved tracking of those changes
that Barrow references. Google Earth affords extraordinary visual access
to the world, allowing us to zoom in on 360-degree street-level images
and see a place for ourselves. Click on a tab and up comes additional
data, from restaurant reviews to traffic updates. We now have the power
to map minutiae at a grand scale, creating what journalist Evan Ratliff
referred to in a 2007 Wired magazine article as “a geoweb that’s expand-
ing so quickly its outer edges are impossible to pin down.”
This increased visual access adds a kind of veracity; it creates a sense
that the cartographer’s subjectivity has been replaced by literal images
of what exists. It’s easy to forget that much of what is found in these
online maps comes from individuals uploading data and photos via
an accessible software language. Applications from map providers like
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo invite volunteers to contribute their own
information onto these increasingly data-rich streetscapes. There was a
time when cartography was the realm of the professional explorer – like
Lewis and Clark – willing to brave the wilds and return home with de-
tailed coordinates and sketches of unknown landscapes. Today, any one
of us can access the necessary software to impose our own geographic
44
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson
45
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
We have this belief that we are more informed, that we have more data,
and yet we have little by way of interpreting the legitimacy of all that
information.
Some believe that access to so much photocartography, like Google
Earth, increases the potential to bias our understanding of what a par-
ticular geography can achieve. We see a picture and it is welded into our
mind as fact. We can forget that these images are just captured moments
in time. In a Google Street View map of my home you’ll find a photo
of my husband in the driveway unloading the trunk of our car after a
vacation. A vacation that we took more than a year ago. The Google Map
image is not an accurate portrayal of today’s reality; it is, rather, a reality
constructed via a series of steps over time in a software program.
There have been some interesting studies on how tourism images im-
pact perceptions of place, and they are worth a look as we consider this
eruption in global photocartography. In her 2005 essay titled Reality vs.
Actuality: A Construction of the Truth, University of Washington student
Carly Cannell cites research about how the photographic language in
tourist brochures affects the way tourists think and act, right down to
the way they construct their own photos. “Our reality becomes that of
the presented photos and our experiences are shaped accordingly,” she
writes. “The preconceived notions of the destination and culture cause
[tourists] to seek out the same pictures as those in the travel books. In
this sense, the travel experience is solely confined to the constructed
reality, and [tourists] do not even acknowledge the fact that [they] are
only seeing a fraction of the city and people.”
As a culture we have come to understand the potential to manipulate
reality within the context of photographic images. We know deep down
that the model on the pages of has pores, yet that airbrushed version of
beauty becomes the standard. As we begin to link photographic images
and other attributes to places via our maps, we start to shape our percep-
tions of that place, for good and bad.
The growing dialogue over user-generated mapping sounds a lot like
early conversations about photography. In 1928, Walter Benjamin wrote
in one of his many essays about film that, “the limits of photography
cannot yet be predicted. Everything to do with it is still so new that even
46
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson
47
The Angels of Mulholland Drive
Adapted from Aereality
Bill Fox
49
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
Susanna and Verdugo mountains enclose it. At about the ten-mile mark
along Mulholland, however, with the road now crossing to the southern
side of the ridge, the view opens up to the L.A. Basin and downtown.
And suddenly I’m gazing out over what seems to be that endless urban
grid. It just disappears into the haze and over the horizon. You can’t help
but pull over and stare at it.
Think of Los Angeles, and most likely the first image that comes to
mind is this grid before me, but at night. At first it was pictured from
Mulholland, and then increasingly after World War II from airplanes.
The night views were more typically presented in film shots or in paint-
ings, given the technical difficulties of making still photos with low light
in vibrating aircraft, or they were presented to us in literature.
The first known attempt at making topographically accurate views of
cities, at least in the West, are in a remarkable travel book by Bernhard
von Breydenbach, who lived from 1440 to 1497. Peregrinatio in Terram
Sanctam, or “Journey to the Holy Land,” was published in 1486. The
Peregrinatio was the first illustrated travel book and the first book to
credit an illustrator on the title page. It was widely reproduced via
woodblocks across Europe as a guide to travelers, became the best-
selling book of its time, and contemporary books reusing the title have
continued to be published worldwide.
Breydenbach hired Erhard Reuwich, whom he called “a skilled
artist,” to document the journey, and they sailed to Iraklion, Modoni,
Rhodes, Venice, Corfu, and Parenzo before reaching the Holy Land. At
each city Reuwich made sketches of elevated oblique views that cap-
tured the overall layout of the towns with their major buildings. The
views were made as a kind of running profile from an imaginary traverse
in the air, more like the profiles made by sailors of coastlines than an
aerial map made from a static viewpoint.
Although a few European townscapes were made prior to
Breydenbach’s journey, the publication of his book created a huge appe-
tite amongst Europeans for aerial views of their own cities. The impetus
may have been twofold. One, as cities were getting larger, people could
no longer see out to the edge of town just by looking down a street. It
was becoming more difficult to place yourself in the world. And, two, as
50
Bill Fox
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TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
that century. The civic pride of Renaissance Italians had nothing on the
manifest ambitions of western expansionists, and as Rep points out in
Bird’s Eye Views: Historic Lithographs of North American Cities, the
American practice was uniquely democratic: the views weren’t made
of just major trading centers, but also small towns such as Moscow,
Idaho. Artists would walk the town streets, sketch the facades of every
structure, then do a perspectival drawing of the city grid and fill in the
buildings. Some of the itinerant artists were so skilled that they could
do a dozen or more such views a year. The aerial views became the most
popular lithographs of the century, and were used by land speculators to
promote development, then by residents to orient themselves. And Los
Angeles, in a land boom on the opposite coast from the older and richer
cities of New York and Boston, had everything to prove and land to sell.
How appropriate that the City of Angels, then, would be represented
iconically by the God’s Eye view of the world
In 1857 the partnership of Kuchel & Dresel made a low oblique of
the pueblo’s Spanish adobe buildings situated around the central plazas
with snow-covered mountains in the background. It’s a somewhat in-
timate view, made as if from a third-story window. By 1871 Augustus
Koch found it necessary to position his vantage point as a high oblique
in order to show how the growing town was surrounded by ranchos and
groves of trees. With hindsight the view seems both bucolic and a come-
hither – as in “Here’s plenty of open land with nothing but orchards on
it, come build.” Then in 1877 Eli S. Grover produced a large panorama
as if drawn from hills in Griffith Park looking out toward the ocean to
south and west. It’s patently clear in this view that the primary resource
of the city is the basin itself, flat land over which to spread for hundreds
of square miles.
A national depression in 1893 slowed the land boom and the popu-
larity of bird’s-eye views slid as well. In the early twentieth century the
country bounced back and cities began growing so fast that the views
became quickly obsolete. For one thing, transportation was increasingly
mechanized, first through trolley cars and light rail lines, then with the
automobile. In a city such as Los Angeles, the availability of land cou-
pled with the spread of oil fields and purchase of automobiles meant a
52
Bill Fox
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TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
tising. Whether it was a page of the newspaper that showed the driving
routes around a twenty-mile radius from downtown, or the route of the
pipeline from Owens Valley, Owens (no relation) helped promote the
Chandler agenda. His imagery, because it was a direct descendant of the
nineteenth-century bird’s-eye lithographs, was easily assimilated by the
public, and his newspaper maps were so popular they were reprinted as
brochures for people to use in their automobiles. Los Angeles was now
so large that you couldn’t navigate around it without an aerial view on
the seat next to you.
54
Herbert Gottfried
Introduction
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56
Herbert Gottfried
57
Image Texture
Gerardo Greene Gondi
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60
Gerardo Greene Gondi
61
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
62
Mapping the Void in
Perec’s Species of Spaces
Alex Haber
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TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
66
Alex Haber
67
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
68
Alex Haber
“This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank
page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portalano-
makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the
names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only
separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. Is the aleph, that
place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously,
anything other than an alphabet?” (13)
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TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
as extant before the act of writing. The Rue Vilin, then, does not come
into being until Perec chooses it and writes on it as a site for the Places
project. Before this, it is nothing but a void, a blank page. Expanding on
this notion, if the map is the territory (or, as we saw in Perec’s case, the
page is the territory), it is because the map precedes the territory, defines
it, brings it into existence.
We have seen that the void, the object of this book, the subject
of Lewis Carroll’s “Map of the Ocean” is also, for Perec, the basis for all
space, all mapping, and all writing. We have no choice, as writers, as
cartographers, but to map this void, in the form of space itself, as well as
in the form of the blank page, that is omnipresent and growing. In doing
so, we actually create those spaces we had hoped to categorize and docu-
ment, both in relation to our own psyches and to the spaces themselves
(if we can even claim that there is a distinction here to begin with). It
is this task, the task of mapping the void itself, with which Perec leaves
us at the end of Species of Spaces: “To write: to try meticulously to retain
something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps
from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or
a few signs” (92). Space is vast, it is empty, it is undifferentiated, and it is
incomprehensible as a complete system. It is only by writing/mapping
that we can hope to make sense of it, for through this exercise we create
the spaces of our lives; through this exercise, we live.
In what seems to be a simple children’s poem by Paul Eluard
that he cites in the opening chapter, Perec lays out this project in a most
playful manner. The poem begins with Paris, zooming in (“In Paris,
there is a street;/ in that street, there is a house;/ in that house, there
is a staircase...”) until it finally reaches a small egg with a bird inside.
In the next stanza, however, Eluard goes the other way, conceptual-
izing space not with Paris as an arbitrary starting point, but with the
bird inside the egg, now hatching: “The bird knocked the egg over;/
the egg knocked the nest over;/ the nest knocked the cage over...” until
finally “the street knocked the town of Paris over” (8). If the logic of
“inside” could continue from Paris down through the egg, why couldn’t
the logic of “knocked over” go the other way? Though in the form of
a children’s poem, this outline of Perec’s project demonstrates the re-
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Alex Haber
Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Ed. and tr. John Sturrock. New
York: Penguin, 1999.
71
A Brief History of
Kite Aerial Photography
Cris Benton
73
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
day. Photographers used wet plates where sensitizing the glass plate,
its wet exposure, and subsequent development had to occur within 20
minutes. Thus, each step was conducted aloft.
Credit for the first aerial photograph goes to French author and art-
ist Felix Tournachon who used the nom de plume Nadar. He captured
the first aerial photo from a balloon tethered 80 meters above over the
Bievre Valley in 1858. The oldest extant aerial photograph is a view of
Boston by James Wallace Black in 1860. Black’s glass negative, entitled
“Boston as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It,” was taken from a
hot-air balloon at 1,200 feet. It was the first clear aerial image of a city
anywhere. Nadar provided the first aerials of European cities with views
of Paris in 1868. The first photographs from a free flight balloon were by
Triboulet in 1879 over Paris. William McMullin matched the feat years
later (1893) to capture views of Philadelphia.
Early photographs from balloons awakened a great enthusiasm for
aerial photography, from the military as well as the public. By 1880, the
development of dry plate techniques allowed photographers to experi-
ment with every imaginable means for getting a camera aloft. In contrast
to balloon photography many of these techniques sent the camera sky-
ward while the photographer remained on the ground.
The age of remote aerial sensing began with photographs taken using
kites. The English meteorologist E. D. Archibald was among the first
to take successful photographs from kites along with contemporary
Arthur Batut of Labruguiere, France. Batut’s aerial photography rig
was ingenious [fig. 2]. The camera was affixed directly to the kite. An
altimeter encoded the exposure altitude on the film allowing scaling of
the image. A slow burning fuse actuated the shutter a selected amount
of time after the kite was launched (typically a few minutes.) As the
shutter released a small flag was dropped to indicate that it was time to
haul the kite down.
In 1897, Alfred Nobel exposed the first successful aerial photograph
from a rocket-mounted camera. This was soon followed in Germany by
Albert Maul’s ingenious compressed air rockets which could loft cam-
eras to heights exceeding 2,000 feet, there to expose remarkably clear
images of the German countryside and parachute back to earth [fig. 3].
74
fig. 1 Nadar “elevating photography to the condition of art”, 1862, Honoré
Daunier. This caricature appeared in Le Boulevard on 25 May, 1862. Albert
Garcia Espuche, author of the catalog essay in “cities: from the balloon to the
satellite” published by the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona
notes the irony of Daunier’s caption for “what Nadar had really done was
to change the level of art to the level of science and utility, from the artistic
drawing to an instrument of work.”
fig. 2 Batut’s illustration of the kite aloft. Note the split bridle, camera,
and altimeter.
Cris Benton
77
fig. 3 Albert Maul’s compressed air rocket and one of the high-resolution
images it produced.
fig. 4 A Neubronner designed pigeon camera and a photograph of Paris us-
ing a diminutive swing-lens panoramic camera.
fig. 5 George Lawrence’s remarkable “San Francisco after the earthquake”.
High-resolution versions of this image are available on the Library of
Congress WWW site.
TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
84
Situating the Grassroots:
Collectivity and Imagination
Anusha Venkataraman
In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place
of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.1
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TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
W hat exactly are ‘spatial practices’? And what practices are not
spatial? Henri Lefebvre breaks spatial practices into three
dimensions: the experienced, the perceived, and the imagined. The
‘experienced’ realm of practices refers to the physical space with which
we interact, and the flows, systems, and constraints which shape those
interactions. ‘Perceived’ spatial practices point to representations of
space, be they maps, systematizations, or language used in discourse
about space. Last, the ‘imagined’ makes reference to “spaces of repre-
sentation,” or those spaces and ideas that envision – or even implement
– new spatial meanings.2 Also described as ‘the production of space,’
this category can include a wide range of creative spatial practices, from
utopias to dreamscapes and the stories we tell about the spaces in which
we live, and even executed projects that radically alter the terrain of
experience.
If this discussion seems opaque, it’s because it is. These realms are, of
course, overlapping, often indistinguishable, and sometimes mutually
constitutive. However, the distinctions are useful in understanding the
relation of power to spatial practice. Power in one realm of spatial prac-
tice can amplify control over another sector; for example, those who
can physically shape the space of the city – architects, planners, and the
people with money to employ them – control the way others interact in
that space. And perhaps more significantly, those with command over
the tools of representation can more easily shape the imagination.
This analysis could lead us to conclude that we are forever inscribed
by the power structures we inhabit. This is true to a degree, but, a la so-
ciologist Pierre Bourdieu, we also have the power to shape the structure
through our personal and collective spatial practices – that is, though
our exercise of agency. The concept of the ‘heterotopia,’ first articulated
by Foucault and later appropriated most notably by geographers David
Harvey and Edward Soja, is useful here. Defined as “counter-sites, a
2 This discussion is greatly indebted to David Harvey’s analysis of Lefebvre and his
‘grid’ of spatial practices, The Condition of Postmodernity (1990), Table 3.1.
86
Anusha Venkataraman
kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites … are simul-
taneously represented, contested, and inverted,”3 heterotopias are the
spaces we make to assert our agency. They rebel against the dominant
structure(s) and re-center spatial practices on the actors that inhabit,
produce, and re-produce space. They are the utopian imagination in real
form, ‘carved out’ from what we are given and cobbled together through
what we can dream.
We can view the proliferation of place-based, grassroots activities
through the lens of the heterotopia. Though outwardly divergent in
their modes of practice and the actors practicing them, as well as the
types of spaces/places in which they are implemented, these strategies
are all “enacted utopias,” microcosms of what we wish to see on a larger
scale. Through their very enactment, sites of resistance produce new
modes of spatial interaction that have the potential to fundamentally
reprogram networks of power.
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TATTERED FRAGMENTS of the MAP
I
t is on the personal, collective, and community levels that we have
carved the spaces for utopian imagination. Decolonized from the
oppressions of capital and moored firmly to shared social values, the
enacted realities of the utopian imagination constitute a new ‘founding
myth,’ an ontological re-orientation of public life. We can re-shape the
collective imagination through the writing of a new founding myth: that
these small, participation-based, place-specific practices are mainstream
and do form a new ethos of social formation. This founding myth is be-
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Anusha Venkataraman
ing written today. Right now. The language we use to intervene in the
existing narrative and describe this founding myth is crucial, insofar
as language, as a mechanism of power, inscribes (and is inscribed by)
one’s relational position in social space. How can we begin to speak of,
with, to, and from the margin without marginalizing it? How do we talk
about the center without reinforcing its supremacy?
Can we imagine a network connecting discrete, though participatory
interventions? Can we imagine a social (infra)structure that encourages
creative grassroots movements to flourish? And last, can we translate
that structure into political and economic policies that enable the mar-
gin to become the center? At the intersection of community organizing,
artistic practice, and political movement-making has emerged a fertile
ground of grassroots spatial strategies that have begun to do this – if we
can envision the movement of those strategies to the center of public
practice, the utopia can be enacted, one step at a time.
89
Anthony Auerbach is an artist and theorist out of London, working in different places.
His (photo)cartographic interests stem from a preoccupation with drawing, hence with
surfaces: marks, traces, inscriptions, and erasure of the same.
Bill Brown is a “nomadic” filmmaker, photographer, and author from Lubbock, Texas. He’s
the author of a zine called Dream Whip and the book Saugus to the Sea.
William L. Fox is a writer, independent scholar, and poet whose work is a sustained
inquiry into how human cognition transforms land into landscape. He currently acts as
director of The Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art.
Alex Haber is a scholar of comparative literature whose research interests include literary
constraint, the city, and theories of selfhood in nineteenth and twentieth century French
literature and thought.
Anusha Venkataraman is a scholar who focuses on engaged artistic practices as tools for
community development. She has worked with artist collectives in Providence, RI and
Brooklyn, NY on participatory urban interventions.
Denis Wood is an artist, author, and critical cartographer based in North Carolina. He is
currently working on the second edition of his groundbreaking work, The Power of Maps.
The Photocartographies exhibition at g727, curated by Adam Katz and Brian Rosa,
included work by Anthony Auerbach, Katherine E. Bash, Cris Benton, Noah Beil, Frank
Gohlke, Gregory Michael Hernandez, David Horvitz, David Maisel, Adam Ryder,
Nikolas Schiller, Oraib Toukan and Angie Waller.